Personal information management (PIM) software has improved considerably in recent years. People use PIM software everyday to manage email, tasks, calendars, and schedule information, and contacts, among other information. Businesses rely heavily on PIM software as well, to coordinate meetings, communications, assignments, projects, contact information, etc. PIM software has become a centralized location in which individuals and businesses store more and more information.
PIM users often take their computers with them, specifically to have access to this information. Sometimes it is not convenient for a user to take a computer to a location that the user might want to access data in the PIM software. In such instances, users may print out the desired information by manually opening a PIM application on his or her computer, selecting a data view that displays the desired information, and then printing the data view, e.g., by performing a File|Print selection from a menu of the PIM application. While this provides the desired information, such a process is tedious and often inconvenient for a user. For example, in a family environment, the family computer might be in a room in the family home that is used as an office or den. The user wanting the information might be in a hurry, e.g., grabbing her keys and heading out of the house when she realizes that she forgot some important list or other data. The user is inconvenienced by having to go back to the room where the computer is located, possibly boot up the computer, launch the PIM application, select or search for the desired data, instruct the PIM application to print the data, and then wait for the printout.
While the advent of wireless all-in-one printer/scanner/fax devices, such as the PSC-2510 by Hewlett-Packard Company of Palo Alto, Calif., has reduced the number of peripheral devices that need to be attached to a computer, the development of such devices has stagnated, and there is no integration between such devices and PIM software to speed up data gathering and printing processes that are manually performed by users of these systems.